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Chapter 26
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Vicar of Wakefield, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humility in the Face of Adversity
The Possibility of Redemption
Family and Society
Equality, Justice, and the Law
Travel, Home, and Belonging
Summary
Analysis
Dr. Primrose’s family disapproves of his plan to reform the prisoners through preaching, but he goes ahead with it anyway, affirming that even the most wicked criminal still deserves a chance at redemption. He then goes into the common area and begins his sermon, though the prisoners play cruel pranks on him throughout. Dr. Primrose does not react to these provocations and after several days finds the prisoners much quieter and more attentive. Dr. Primrose thinks of secular ways to help them too, encouraging them to convert their hobby of cutting tobacco stoppers into a subscription-based cottage industry, which he manages. He also sets up a system of rewards and fines for moral and immoral behavior. Within two weeks, he finds the atmosphere in the prison noticeably improved.
This scene carries Dr. Primrose’s belief in forgiveness to its logical conclusion. His family, which consists of otherwise moral individuals, tries to dissuade him. But Dr. Primrose stays firm as he understands that for his doctrine of redemption to hold true, it must hold true for everyone: if the criminal cannot be redeemed of their sins, nobody can. His patience and humility finds practical application here, as he endures the tricks the other prisoners play on him without reacting and soon finds success. Curiously, Dr. Primrose’s program for moral education contains business as an integral part, complicating his largely antagonist relationship to the capitalist economy of 18th-century England.
Themes
Dr. Primrose reflects on his success and on the law more generally, finding that it should do far more to reward and rehabilitate criminals rather than exclusively punish them. He is especially opposed to capital punishment for any crime except murder, arguing that property alone is never a reason to take a life, and pointing out that in more “savage” societies very few crimes receive the death penalty. The problem, as he sees it, is that the law is made by the rich and applied to the poor. He bemoans Britain’s comparatively high incarceration rate, and dreams of a system in which law protects rather than rules tyrannically over the people. To Dr. Primrose, such a system is not only possible but necessary, and it could both reduce violence in society and save the souls of criminals whom society too quickly dismisses as morally irredeemable.
Much like during the earlier debate with the butler, here Dr. Primrose serves once more as a mouthpiece for Goldsmith’s own views of legal justice and prison reform. Arguing from an intellectual and moral foundation of Christian forgiveness, Dr. Primrose bemoans both the primacy of property in the law over human life and the legal system’s lacking interest in reforming and reeducating criminals. In effect, he argues that the law perpetuates crime just as often as it prevents it. Thus, in his discourse on justice, Dr. Primrose is able to synthesize his moral-religious and practical inclinations, gesturing to how a more forgiving justice system would not only be more Christian but more effective, too.
Themes
Literary Devices
